Sean Penn’s Falklands War

As of today, Sean Penn is the new Karl Lagerfeld—the man upon whom, having disrespected something dear to the United Kingdom, the British papers most gleefully pile contempt. Lagerfeld’s sin was to insult Adele. Penn’s, far graver, was to suggest that the Falkland Islands, the long-contested archipelago off the coast of Argentina, do not rightfully belong to Britain, which has controlled them since 1833. This month, after the British announced that the Duke of Cambridge—né Prince William—would be deployed to the Falklands with the R.A.F., relations between the U.K. and Argentina, which degenerated into a war in 1982, have been increasingly hostile. The U.K.’s position is that the Islands will remain British unless their three thousand or so inhabitants express a wish that it be otherwise; the Argentineans, along with Penn, see this as a flimsy attempt at perpetuating a historic theft. “The world today is not going to tolerate any ludicrous and archaic commitment to colonialist ideology,” Penn said during a meeting on Monday with Cristina Kirchner, the president of Argentina. (Penn is prone to this sort of thing: see John Lahr’s Profile for more.)

Yesterday, in Uruguay, Penn struck again, calling Britain’s decision to send the prince to the Falklands “unthinkable.” He called the Falklands “the Malvinas of Argentina,” which, to British ears, is significantly worse than calling football “soccer.” The headline of a story in the Daily Mail read:

He’s not British or Argentine. Not that this stops the achingly trendy ex-Mr. Madonna shooting his mouth off about the Falklands.

This was accompanied by a quote from Patrick Mercer, a former Army officer and a Tory M.P., who said that Penn “seems to know nothing about the situation judging by this moronic comment. A good number of his movies have been turkeys, so I supposed we shouldn’t expect much better coming out of his mouth.” Another column, in the Mail Online, suggested, “Get out of the Falklands yourself, Mr. Penn.” (There is a long tabloid tradition of rabble-rousing with regard to the Falklands. The Sun’s notorious headline, after a British submarine, on Margaret Thatcher’s orders, sank the General Belgrano on May 4, 1982, killing more than three hundred Argentineans, was “GOTCHA.”)

Over at the Telegraph, Tim Stanley, a professor of United States history at Oxford (he is working on a biography of Pat Buchanan), had come up with a novel riposte: Sean Penn, he said, should give up the keys to his Malibu estate, which, he argued, actually belongs to Mexico. “America’s claim over Malibu is tenuous and rooted in patriarchy,” he wrote, mimicking Penn’s tone. “Sean Penn’s house is a mocking reminder of that brute chauvinism, with its high white walls and spacious interiors. Its swimming pool is an insult to the honor of the Mexican people.”